Archive for September 13th, 2012

The Preliminary Report of the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 was launched with much fanfare on Tuesday. This document, written by expensive consultants at taxpayers’ expense, although seemingly comprehensive, in actual fact still leaves many crucial policy questions unanswered.

If these gaping holes are not addressed, this blueprint will suffer the same fate as all the other education blueprints that have been launched by previous Prime Ministers and Education Ministers.

Firstly, this blueprint does not contain any indication that the Ministry of Education has learnt from mistakes in the past.

Many of the initiatives announced under this new Blueprint are recycled ideas and past unfulfilled promises. For example, the Education Development Master Plan (Pelan Induk Pembangunan Pendidikan) 2006 to 2010 promised that any existing education gaps would be closed by continuing to provide necessary basic infrastructure necessities on a continuous basis.Read the rest of this entry »

SEPT 13 — Of late we only need to scan news sites and local dailies and we are likely to come across news items that highlight that “men have lost their reason”. To express unhappiness over the organisation of Bersih 3.0, we had grown men (ex-army veterans) performing “butt exercises” outside the front gate of Bersih co-chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan’s residence. Their crude and unbecoming behaviour only serves to highlight their level of maturity (or lack of) and remains but a sad reflection of their character.

We have also read about individuals going to the residence of the chief minister of Penang to conduct “funeral rites” while placing a garlanded framed photograph of the CM on the gate of his house. Other examples of such behaviour — the sending of a faeces-shaped “chocolate cake” and the disruption of ceramahs (the throwing of stones and water bottles) — all point towards this unwelcome and alarming increase in irrational, violent and unreasonable behaviour.Read the rest of this entry »